A new cult is moldering
through the U.S. underbrush. Its name: dianetics.

Last week, its bible,
"Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health," was steadily
climbing the U.S. bestseller lists. Demand was especially heavy on the
West Coast. Bookstores in Los Angeles were selling "Dianetics"
on an under-the-counter basis. Armed with the manual, which they called
simply "The Book," fanatical converts overflowed Saturday night
meetings in Hollywood, held dianetics parties, formed clubs, and "audited"
(treated) each other.

In many ways, dianetics
("the science of mind") is the poor man's psychoanalysis: it
has the touch of Couéism and a mild resemblance to Buchmanite confession.
It purports to cleanse the mind of previous harmful influences, thus vastly
increasing its powers and efficiency, by making the individual relive
former painful experiences to "discharge" their evil power.
According to dianetics' discoverer L. (for Lafayette) Ron (for Ronald)
Hubbard: "The hidden source of all psychosomatic ills and human aberrations
has been discovered and skills have been developed for their invariable
cure." Sample ills: arthritis, allergies, asthma, some coronary difficulties,
eye trouble, ulcers, migraine headaches, sex deviations.

Ron Hubbard, 39,
a swashbuckling, red-haired six-footer, originally unveiled dianetics
in the magazine "Astounding Science Fiction." As a result, its
earliest devotees were science fiction fans. When "Dianetics"
was first published (Hermitage House: $4), doctors and psychologists paid
it little heed. But last week some were getting in on what seemed like
a good thing.

The Los Angeles Times
carried an ad: "Those interested in receiving dianetic auditing please
telephone DU 2-3260." At the end of the line was Dr. Vernon Bronson
Twitchell, psychologist; he said he got about a dozen calls a day.

Reason & Records

According to Hubbard's
"science," the mind consists of two parts: 1) the analytical,
(corresponding roughly to Freud's "conscious" mind), which perceives,
remembers and reasons; and 2) , the reactive (something like Freud's "unconscious"),
which neither remembers nor reasons but simply records. Normally, the
analytical mind is dominant. But it can be "switched off" by
unconsciousness from injury or anesthesia, more often by acute emotional
shock or physical pain.

Then says Hubbard,
the reactive mind is switched on. It does not store memories, but "engrams"
-- impressions on protoplasm itself. An engram is, he declares, "a
complete recording, down to the last accurate detail of every perception
present in a moment of . . . 'unconsciousness.'"

Modern man's analytical
mind, says Hubbard, is a perfect computing machine, incapable of error
except when it is supplied with wrong data. An example, typical of Hubbard's
cases: a woman is struck by a man, and while she is unconscious he kicks
and reviles her. A chair is overturned and a faucet has been left running.
she does not "remember" these things because she is unconscious,
but according to dianetics her reactive mind records them all in an engram.
Later, the crash of an overturned chair and the sound of running water
might make the engram "key-in" to her analytical mind, vaguely
bring back the pain of the kicks or actually make her ill.

Count to Seven

To exorcise such
a demon engram, the dianetics patient lolls on a couch or easy chair in
a dimly lit room. The auditor says: "When I count from one to seven
your eyes will close." He keeps counting to seven until the patient's
eyes close. (The patient, says Hubbard, is still awake but in "reverie.")
In a typical procedure, the auditor may next command: "Let us return
to your fifth birthday." The patient's mind is then supposed to slip
back along its "time-track" to that birthday. Having "returned,"
he "relives" the experience.

By skipping from
one point on the time track to another, the patient eventually relives
a variety of painful experiences. In so doing, he may reel from the relived
pain of a blow on the head, double up with stomach cramps, sweat or shiver
in terror. Once these painful engrams have been run through the waking
analytical mind, says Hubbard, they lose their "charge" -- their
power of evil. The analytical mind puts them in a dead file like so many
closed accounts. The final goal of dianetics -- in its own jargon -- is
to make a patient a "clear," a person whose every engram has
been resolved.

Hubbard's most striking
departure from older psychoanalytical schools is his insistence that protoplasm
begins to record engrams immediately after conception. He sees the period
of gestation as one of dire discomforts and great perils. The most important
of all engrams, which he dubs "basic-basic," is the one received
after conception -- perhaps during the mother's examination by her doctor,
or in some mishap before her pregnancy is known.

Forceps Pains

Frank Dessler, an
office manager at 20th Century-Fox, had dabbled in dianetics and was persuaded
to audit an actor's wife who had suffered from migraine. Says Dessler:
"She was suffering a severe headache, but it wasn't like migraine.
It seemed to be sharp and on either side of the head. Finally, she actually
experience birth. She crouched on the couch in foetal position with her
head between her knees." She attributed the pain she felt tot he
pull of the forceps on her head. Having relived her birth, her migraine
disappeared.

A couple in their
30s, Arthur and Elena Tracy, were auditing each other. Says Elena: "I'd
had a great deal of illness all my life -- every psychosomatic illness
you can think of. I was in bed all through my last pregnancy and for three
months after it. Now I believe I'll have no more trouble. I believe it
with all my heart. My husband took me back to what I believe was the prenatal
period of my life. I began to feel as if I were drowning. I brought up
phlegm . . . and my eyes were running. I almost choked and began gasping
for breath. Apparently my head was twisted to one side in my mother's
womb. The pain was intense."

Some professional
psychologists have taken up dianetics. Says Dr. Jean Bordeaux, psychotherapist
(Ph.D., no M.D.): "I'm using dianetics every day and using it on
dozens of patients. It works. Hubbard made a contribution -- make no mistake
about that."

However, Hubbard
insists that the treatment, even at the hands of an untrained layman,
can do no harm. "On this," says Dr. Bordeaux, "we part
company."

More specific is
the concern of Dr. Pauline K. Pumphrey (as osteopath with an M.D.), in
whose ultramodern Santa Monica home two-score dianetics fans met last
week to pool their resources (some hoped to audit each other -- somewhat
in the fashion of a Buchmanite meeting). There is danger, Dr. Pumphrey
holds, if Hubbard's cellular theory is right, that an inept auditor "contacting"
the engram recorded at the time of a severe hemorrhage, for example, might
cause the hemorrhage to be repeated.

But most dianetics
fans are laymen and some accept every Hubbard word as revealed truth.
Said one: "I have trouble only when I have any doubts. The main thing
is for the auditor to subject himself to a thorough indoctrination which
amounts to a sublime faith."

Hubbard's own opinion
of his contribution: "The creation of dianetics is a milestone for
man comparable to his discovery of fire and superior to his inventions
of the wheel and the arch."